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Hollywood’s Jewish Moment

American film-makers have had a notoriously difficult time bringing Jewish stories to the screen. For decades, they kept mum on things Jewish for fear of losing the American mainstream. And when overt engagement with Jews and Judaism began tentatively to make it onto the screen in films by Woody Allen, Barbara Streisand, and Steven Spielberg, the result was a carnival of self-consciousness, self-deprecation, and schmaltz.

But in the last few years, there have been signs that Hollywood has finally begun to turn the corner on its Jewish question. And with the release of Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man, what seems to be Hollywood’s new opening to Jews and Judaism goes to an entirely new level. It’s a watershed event—perhaps the first time a really profound exploration of Judaism has been committed to film by first-string Hollywood directors. The result is easily one of the best Jewish films ever made, anywhere.

The film centers on Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor whose suburban life is going to pieces in a serious way. Larry’s wife informs him that she wants a divorce so she can marry their sleazy neighbor, the kids are experimenting with stealing and drugs, and the police are coming after his dissolute brother Arthur who’s sleeping on their couch. At the university, one of Larry’s students resorts to bribery and threatens legal action over a botched midterm, and an unknown persecutor has got the ear of the committee reviewing his tenure bid. When the lawyers start getting into the act, the bills pile up, and Larry lurches toward insolvency.

The opening scenes invoke Job, of course. An apparently decent guy suffers an unending series of bone-rattling personal defeats, seemingly without explanation. And as his troubles mount, Larry begins asking the kinds of questions that appear throughout the Bible on this score: Is there a God who’s trying to tell him something? Or is he really just the plaything of impersonal forces ruling an empty world? And if God really is trying to tell him something, how is he supposed to figure out what God is saying?

You could easily forget these questions are on the table because A Serious Man is also wicked sharp just as satire. The Coens’ art form is caricature, and like any superb cartoonist they deal in exaggerated sketches of real people (or real types). Here the pen-strokes are a facial expression, a hand-gesture, and a couple of sentences of dialogue, which often suffice for the Coens to penetrate straight to the heart of a given real-life persona. In this film, the Coens are at the top of their form, with nearly every scene dragging in yet another Jewish department chair, lawyer, doctor, dentist, rabbi, rabbi’s secretary, Hebrew-school teacher, school principal, and so on and on—every one extorting a laugh of shocked recognition from the audience as they careen into Larry’s life, and we suddenly realize we’ve met them before. And the detail work is so fine that even each of the 13-year-olds on the school bus seems to be a kid you knew in school. A Serious Man is as funny as movies get, and much better as a shakedown of the Jews and their foibles than Woody Allen ever was, even at his best. And unlike Woody Allen, when these guys take a swipe at the Jews, they actually know what they’re talking about.

But A Serious Man parts company with some of the Coens’ earlier films in that there’s nothing here that’s just about the gag. In fact, there’s hardly a scene that doesn’t also do double duty as an attempt to make progress on those biblical questions. The first thing you notice is that the dialogue is packed with lines that, while working flawlessly at the level of the plot, are also micro-articulations of substantive philosophical positions the characters are staking out. “Actions always have consequences,” Larry tells the Korean student who is trying to bribe him. “In this office, actions have consequences. Not just physics. Morally.” But the student, who’s just heard Larry lecture on Schrödinger’s cat, is insistent that Larry can’t know these things: “Mere surmises, sir,” he tells Larry. “Very uncertain.”

There it is: Is God running the show, or chance? Are there consequences, or only surmises? Is morality real, or is it just a pious Jewish fiction?

The Coens take it as an axiom that there’s a genuine ambiguity here that won’t be easily resolved. One of the best parts of the film is its opening aggada (rabbinic tale) about a young couple in a shtetl in Russia, presumably Larry’s grandparents or great-grandparents. The husband brings home his broken delivery wagon together with an unexpected dinner guest: An old hasid who helped him pull the wagon out of the snow, and whom his young wife knows to have been dead for three years. Is he a dybbuk (a demon), or has there been some ghastly mistake? The wife—uncannily chiseled out of a photograph of the young Golda Meyerson—considers a bit and then drives an ice-pick into the heart of her husband’s guest. Did she save them from ruin, or did she just murder a kind old man? The Coens don’t tell us, and the point is well taken. In some of the most important things, you just can’t know for sure. You only find out the truth later, if at all.

The ability to look at the same sequence of events and see them either as the hand of God, or, with equal plausibility, as arbitrary abuse at the hands of a meaningless universe, is central to the film, its philosophical ground-zero. From here, the Coens ask us to take on a couple of huge issues: Given the painful ambiguity of experience, is there any way Larry can get somewhere hacking away at these questions on his own? And is there any point in trying to approach Jewish tradition, or the rabbis who are supposed to be the keepers of its wisdom, for help?

Larry is, like his great-grandfather Velvel, a “rational man”. He’s this brilliant Jewish guy like many we’ve all met. He can do advanced mathematics off the top of his head at a chalkboard without checking the numbers. But like most really smart people, he’s completely unaware that he’s spent his whole life coasting, avoiding the hard parts. So when things start to go haywire and his wife tells him she’s leaving him, he’s completely unprepared. “What have I done?” he stammers out. And then he answers the question himself: “I haven’t done anything.”

The Coens clearly think a rocket scientist like Larry should be able to figure out that not doing anything is no way to keep your wife’s affections, or to win the respect of children and peers. And eventually, Larry does catch sight of this fact—sort of. In a crucial scene, Larry’s brother Arthur, who is about to be sent up the river by the vice squad, runs crying in his underwear from the motel room to which they’ve been exiled by Larry’s wife and the sleazy neighbor. Larry catches up to Arthur at the empty motel swimming pool, where Arthur cries out in agony: “Hashem didn’t give me s—! Hashem didn’t give me s—!” (Hashem is a particularly indirect and pious way of saying “God” in Hebrew.) Taken aback, Larry says: “It’s not fair to blame Hashem, Arthur. Sometimes you just have to help yourself.”

Larry doesn’t notice that he’s the one that really needs this advice. And he doesn’t do a thing to try and act on it, either. (That is, not until the final moments of the film). And this isn’t the only thing Larry doesn’t notice. His sufferings, he tells a friend, came on him “like a bolt from the blue.” But we know that isn’t exactly true. All through the film, the Coens drop clues that Larry’s troubles have been building up for years, only he was too slow or too much in denial to catch on. When Larry walks into a room to find his teen-aged daughter beating up on her younger brother, he knows enough to say, “What’s going on here?” But he never puts the pieces together. What’s going on here is that the money that’s been disappearing from his wallet has been causing ongoing friction as his children grab for it. Only Larry keeps coasting, too preoccupied and too passive to get to the bottom of what’s really happening.

Which takes us to the heart of the film. Larry actually isn’t much like Job at all: Job is presented as being unambiguously righteous. The terrible things that happen to him are presented as being completely arbitrary. And Job’s knowledge of his own situation is presented as being perfect, too. His view of what’s happening to him is crystal clear. Larry, on the other hand, isn’t unambiguously righteous. (He says he’s going to hand the envelope with the bribe money over to the discipline committee, and he even means to do it, but the envelope stays locked in his desk.) And he has a terrifically difficult time getting a clear view of what’s actually taking place around him. In this, the Coens are actually taking their cues from earlier biblical works like Exodus, Judges and Jeremiah, where hardly anyone is unambiguously righteous, including those who really want to be; and where a clear understanding in real-time of what’s actually going on is something rare indeed.[1]

As it turns out, A Serious Man pivots on a question that is absent from Job but is absolutely central in Jeremiah: What does it take for a supposedly serious man— a seemingly able man who wants to do good—to open his eyes and recognize the consequences of his actions, unfolding right there in front of him? At first, we think it’s only the bad things that Larry misses or misunderstands. But as the film works towards its climax, the Coens test this question by turning the tables on Larry. We get to see a good old “act of God” as one of Larry’s tormentors is suddenly killed off. It really looks as though God may have decided to hear Larry’s anguished cries. And by my count, there are at least three more signs—little developments with his son, his wife, and the tenure committee—that Larry’s life is beginning to turn around.

Now that God seems to be making his move, the question isn’t really whether God is there anymore. The question is whether Larry is there. Is he capable of drawing strength from the assist he’s gotten and helping himself? Can he even seeGod’s assistance coming to him in the depths of the pit into which his enemies have cast him? Or will he fail to notice these signs too? God’s little attempt at a dialogue with Larry and what follows from it carry us down to the last amazing moments of this amazing film.

The bottom line is that the Coens, like the biblical texts themselves, are deeply skeptical about the chances of our figuring it all out on our own. We need some help. Can we get it from Jewish tradition? A Serious Man takes on this question in Larry’s encounters with each of three rabbis. The rabbis, too, are stunningly crafted caricatures—beginning with the eager-beaver assistant rabbi, who’s still high on his discovery that everything in life depends on your perspective; and on to the wise-cracking senior rabbi who’s in on the secret that really there are no answers; and from there to Marshak, the rabbi emeritus, who has reached death’s door in possession of all the wisdom mortal man can attain.

The portrait of Marshak, the third rabbi, is particularly stunning. Marshak is the Coens’ stand-in for God himself in the film. No one can get in to see him because he “doesn’t do pastoral work anymore.” Larry begs to see him but only catches a glimpse of him through the crack in a door. Only later do we get to see him in a brief exchange with Larry’s son Danny, in which we learn that Marshak is not only pretty close to all-knowing, but also beneficent. Danny, whom we’ve seen only as a cynical and contemptuous little creep, is transfixed. “Be a good boy,” Marshak says, and for one precious moment, we believe there’s a chance he will.[2]

These interviews with the rabbis are super as satire. But if you look past the satire, it’s pretty obvious that all these rabbis are giving Larry real answers. The shift in perspective needed to see God’s hand in the world is an authentic prophetic theme treated time and again in the Midrash. And both the second rabbi and Marshak make it reasonably clear that the way to fight the despair of the pit is through doing good, through the commandments, which is the conclusion of Ecclesiastes. Yet Larry can’t get anything out of these rabbis. In part, this is because they’re just too ludicrous; and in part, it’s because Larry is too filled with self pity and contempt, and isn’t really listening to what they’re saying. Thus while the Coens leave us the possibility that Jewish tradition may really have something important to say, they’re also quite clear that Larry’s repeated attempts to engage this tradition give him nothing. He tries, but between the limitations of the rabbis and his own, it’s a data base he just can’t access.[3]

What’s most difficult and devastating about A Serious Man is not the fact that there are no answers to Larry’s questions. We actually get quite a few answers in the course of this film: We get a clear view of Larry’s passivity, his self-absorption, his unwillingness to get to the bottom of unpleasant things. All these contribute to what happens to him in a pretty direct way. And when the heat gets turned up, he doesn’t succeed in rethinking his life, or in throwing some good works into the balance. Instead, his morals begin to go wobbly in ways that just make matters worse—like with that envelope. These aren’t complete answers as to why Larry is suffering, and they don’t give us an exact road-map of what God wants from him. But these partial answers go an awfully long way. The trouble is that Larry can’t see them at all. Only we can.

In this, the Coens’ message is starkly similar to that of the Bible, and especially that of Jeremiah. There are answers, if only partial ones. They’re really there. But recognizing them is hard.

In many ways, A Serious Man is a rejoinder to Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999), which explores many of the same themes of emptiness and dissolution in the life of a suburban American family. Unlike Mendes’ film, A Serious Man doesn’t force you to swallow the film-makers’ little sermons. And it doesn’t sell out to the nihilist temptation as American Beauty does. The world the Coens paint for us is plenty difficult. Yet there’s no appeal to the aesthetic as our last place of refuge, no over-the-counter Buddhism, no longings for an honorable escape in an unwished-for death. As befits a really fine Jewish film, A Serious Man takes the opposite road. It insists on the attempt to build up and hold on to a moral life, no matter how bad things get. Larry Gopnik isn’t who we want to be, nor is his Judaism what it could be. But in watching him strive to make such a life in the face of real hardship, we get to see what the glint of God’s will in this world might look like, and we can imagine ourselves striving, too, for a more righteous life, and perhaps doing a little better than he did.

Notes

[1] Gideon can serve as a symbol of this problem. When God appears before the great warrior to tell him, “The Lord is with you,” Gideon responds by insisting: “The Lord has forsaken us.”Judges 6:13.[2]Why does Marshak refuse to see Larry while he’s willing to speak to the bar mitzvah boys? Compare with the opinion of R. Yohanan in Talmud Baba Batra 12b: “From the day the Temple was destroyed, prophecy has been taken from the prophets and given to fools and childen.” (Note that there’s a less-known dissenting view of R. Avdimi Demin Haifa, who argues that prophecy has been given to the wise.)[3]The Bible touches on the weakness and failure of the bearers of Jewish tradition, too—from Aaron’s creation of the golden calf, to the sickening behavior of the Levites in the book of Judges, all the way to the feckless scribes and false prophets of Jeremiah’s day. And in this, too, the Coens’ A Serious Man is excruciatingly faithful to the original texts. Rabbis are only human. But it would be really helpful if they could be just a little less so.

14 Responses to "Hollywood’s Jewish Moment"

Barry Werner

July 25, 2011

retired physicist

It is rewarding to read the many responses that extend this discussion further.

The movie is a modern, satirical, comical, and utterly disturbing retelling of the Job story, with references to other ideas in Judaism. Even the social implications of its utterly disturbing nature are important (Is it good for the Jews?).

Given all the seemingly meaningless tragedies that can occur to us, it is important to note that just about the only thing we have some control over is our ability to do good. (Even that depends on a neurological substratum that is beyond our control as well as on how severely we become emotionally damaged by the horrible random vicissitudes that life can throw at us, and at what age we experience them). As Yoram Hazony says “And both the second rabbi and Marshak make it reasonably clear that the way to fight the despair of the pit is through doing good, through the commandments, which is the conclusion of Ecclesiastes.” Doing good may not totally protect us against experiencing tragedy, but it can make life enjoyable for the individual (experiencing love is deeply enjoyable), it can reduce the tragedies that human society imposes on us (if people try to be good to each other), and it can help stave off the tragedies we experience from natural causes outside human society (science is a way to do good on a global scale, it is our response to diseases, predators, weather phenomena, global warming, etc). "When the truth has found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies don't you want somebody to love?"

Jed Arkin

May 23, 2010

Shalem

I saw An Ordinary Man at your recommendation. In the pool scene at the Jolly Roger, a sign on the deck is partially obscured by the characters so that it reads “No Divin”.

Alex Luxenberg

April 21, 2010

Yeshiva University

I thoroughly enjoyed reading your response to A Serious Man, and I have, in turn, subscribed to your Jerusalem Letters. When the film first came out, I spent a number of Shabbat Lunches explaining the depths and intricacies of the film to people who found it to be 'boring' or 'pointless'. Now, I will send your response as an explanation of the film.

I found it interesting that so many people had trouble realizing it's fundamental messages, perhaps lending to the veracity of its claim that people are not tuned to pick up on real life issues. The film, I thought, was both insightful and refreshing. Insightful in the ways that you mentioned in your response. And, refreshing, in that it was a movie that actually said something. While I agree with all that you had to say, I think there is one, important, aspect of the film that you did not mention. Namely, the motif of 'The calm before the storm,' which becomes rather apparent at the culmination of the movie with the oncoming of a tornado. A Serious Man reminds us, in a timely fashion given the economic downturn, that things can always get worse. As the tornado nears, Gopnik receives a call, presumably, that he has a terminal illness, just one example of how things got drastically worse as the movie came to an end. When you juxtapose the events at the end of the film, the impending illness and tornado, than the rest of the 'tragedies' do not seem as bad. In fact, this ties in nicely with notion of perspective as presented by the young rabbi.

Lastly, I appreciate your exposition of the Hasidic tale that introduced the movie, I could not figure it out.

Ed Winter

April 14, 2010

Northwestern Memorial Hospital

Thank you for a wonderful, serious review of the film, A Serious Man. You have effectively rebutted those who saw the movie as a piece of anti-Semitism.In the extra material which was included in our DVD, one of the Coen brothers states they wanted to Marshak to be seen as a "wizard." this is the way Danny and I think his father, Larry, perceive the Rabbis, especially Marshak. Rabbis are wizards who can control G-d through their wizardry. So we are seeing the Rabbis from Larry's perspective. They are telling Larry what he already knows as he says to his brother: "you have to help yourself." He knows the right thing to do, but cannot bring himself to do it. At the end he succumbs to the bribe and changes the student's grade which puts him and his son in mortal danger. Maybe the Coens are saying that Jews, who know the right thing to do even in the face of calamity and G-d's apparent absence, can be bought off at least here in America by the non Jewish culture, putting us in mortal danger.

Jeff Helmreich

April 2, 2010

UCLA

Yoram, this is by a wide margin the best piece of writing on ‘A Serious Man’ I’ve read since its debut – and as an avid fan I’ve read all of it, from the New Yorker to the Forward. It is one of the best interpretive essays I’ve read in a long time, period. Never mind that you shared some of my own reactions, putting them much better than I had: eg. that there’s wisdom in the rabbis’ “answers” and that the film is eerily reminiscent of, even responsive to, ‘American Beauty’ (my brother and I call it ‘American Jewish Beauty,’ even the piano theme is eerily referential!).

More striking is that you uncover some of the crucial philosophical and religious messages in the film, rightly observing that they’re liable to get lost in the laughs (I laughed uncontrollably, almost constantly, the first time I saw it). One of them is that God's existence, even His involvement, is not questioned in the film. ‘What is he trying to tell me?’ Gopnik demands. But neither he nor anyone else ever doubts there’s a ‘He’up there. God’s existence, and presence, is a given.

Here, too, is a crucial parallel with Job. Both Job and Gopnik suffer unjustly (more obviously in Job’s case). But their primary complaint isn’t the fact of the suffering. It isn’t “Oy vey, I’m suffering.” It’s, rather, the lack of a good explanation, a coherent story or plan, or some theological meaningfulness. It is almost as though they take their recent troubles as a brief against God, demanding that He put up and explain.

In this they join generations of Jewish heroes like Abraham and Moses, who stand out from the heroes of other faiths in their readiness to challenge God whenever His decrees fail to make sense. And Judaism stands out from other faiths in celebrating this very fact, lionizing Abraham and Job and demoting characters like Noah – obedient and accepting -- to the sidelines of Jewish heroism. Gopnik doesn’t demand an end to his suffering; he never asks the lawyer or the rabbi how to fix things with his wife or his life. He demands, rather, an explanation and is almost angry at God for failing to provide one.

Although I see the point of your references to Eccliastes and Jeremiah, I found the three rabbis really offering versions of the same answer. And the first rabbi, the most junior and clownish, seems to come closest to the main idea. It’s the notion that the meaningfulness of life is a matter of perspective. That sounds simple and trivial, but it can be understood more profoundly.

One of the biggest embarrassments of contemporary philosophy is that it fails to take seriously the question the field was arguably made for: the meaning, or meaningfulness, of life. Why am I here and why does it all matter? These basic questions get no attention in Russell, Frege or Wittgenstein, and nothing deep in Descartes or Leibniz either, for whom the answers are obvious and heavily theological. Finally, in the 20th century, it is taken up by a few contemporary analytic philosophers, the most prominent and profound being Thomas Nagel. His essay ‘The Absurd’ argues, essentially, that the struggle to find meaning in life is really the struggle to reconcile our subjective view of ourselves with the way we look from an objective, impersonal universe (“the view form nowhere,” he calls it): just another tiny person in an enormous, largely impersonal natural drama. But it’s a struggle Nagel doesn’t try to resolve.

Does Judaism do better? One of the most perceptive points of the film is the realization that even if there is a God, His presence doesn’t guarantee meaningfulness. An equally powerful message, which comes through only as the scenes unfold, is that meaningfulness need not be obvious or even accessible to be there. From God’s perspective, too much is encompassed, so much awesome knowledge of things past and future, of natural wonders and complicated mixes of time and space that bear on everything all at once. If it all made sense from our perspective, that’d be an unlikely miracle in equally dire need of explanation. God’s transcendence, His mystery, the elusiveness of His plan, is built into the idea that it’s a plan worthy of Him. As the Korean student’s father says, “Accept the mystery.”

This notion – “my thoughts aren’t yours”— is echoed in God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind, which for me has always been one of the most puzzling parts of Tanach. What does all that talk about nature and primordial creation have to do with Job’s questions? ‘A Serious Man,’ which takes the whirlwind literally at the end, suggests an answer, namely that it’s the wrong question. Gopnik’s (and Job’s) question is a state of mind, and it is one that is resolved not by information, by a textual or sermonic response, but through an act, an act of taking another’s perspective. Gopnik’s sin is his failure to get beyond his own perspective, and it leaves him blind and uninsightful in a way that, as you point out, only brilliant people can be.The question of meaningfulness seems like a serious one, raised by serious men. But it sometimes seems as though people engaged in deeply other-oriented ethical activity, vigorously immersed in activism or Torah study or kiruv, seem less wracked by it. Are they too busy, or are they doing something that robs the question of its force?

(Camus raises the same question in the Myth of Syciphus, and seems to answer it precisely this way in The Plague – the same answer suggested by the goofy Rabbi Nochner – that doing good takes you outside the spell of the question. A new book by Susan Wolf, a leading contemporary ethicist and student of Nagel’s, (‘The Meanings of Lives’) answers in a similar spirit: connecting yourself with something objectively valuable is a way to transcend the despair that comes from the apparent mismatch of our subjective and objective views of ourselves. But the answer feels cheap and easy, like getting meaningfulness through the reflected glow of something else meaningful. And yet, something seems right about connecting with a more objective viewpoint. I don’t know, but it’s a serious problem, and it’s wonderful that this seemingly farcical film – big budge Hollywood -- not only raises it but echoes Judaism’s unique contributions to the topic. Too bad most viewers will miss it unless they read your essay. Thanks for the great food for thought!

Stuart Wilder

March 25, 2010

None

I want to let you know that I appreciate your emails. I have been a subscriber to Azure for about four years, but I first learned about you when, about seven or eight years ago, I decided to resume reading Megillat Esther from the scroll, as I did when I was a teenager. We live in an area or Reform and Reconstructionist shuls (Chabad has recently made a presence here too, but still my wife and I are that rarest of things in our Jewish community— two Jews who married one another) and I despaired of my children thinking Purim was only about a tasteless Purim shpiel that taught nothing. So I got a tape, and while relearning the trope, I thought I should learn something about what I was reading, and that, through Amazon, led me to The Dawn. I loved the drawing of contrasts between Mordechai and Machiavelli, and donated copies of the book to that synagogue and the one I am a member of now. I wish I could tell you someone else read it, but I can't. Maybe there will be a kid who like I was is a library rat looking to be the first one to crack the spine of a new book. In any event, it was a great gift to me, and I thank you for it.

On your letter about A Serious Man, I think you explained to me why I, and my parents liked it. The ground is always shifting beneath us, and I for one, have to keep reminding myself and my children (my wife gets annoyed beyond belief when I philosophize at her) that often the best you can do is to take advantage of what good circumstances you are handed and do your best to make better those which are not so good. How to do both is the product of judgment, which itself is the product of wisdom, experience, and the gift of a mind that can use both. When it comes out of my mouth though I sound like a pollyanna.

Where the ground shifts under my feet is the ensuring that I have Jewish grandchildren. I had my son and daughter bar/bat mitzvahed in Israel, and the Southern Wall in Jerusalem. (I was their tutor, too, a great honor for me.) Jewish education here is abysmal. My daughter wanted to go to a Jewish day school but it was just too far away to be practical. She attended Sunday school for Hebrew only but even that has become a chore for her with what they weigh her down with at her regular school. My son (like my wife) professes to be an atheist, and distances himself from rituals as much as possible. (My wife bless her, still lights the Sabbath and Hanukah candles and does the Seder meal, and preserves, generally, what it takes for this house to feel like a Jewish home. But that is another story.) However, he is interested in what happens in the Middle East, and in Israel's survival and stays up on news about it. The pantry is filled with Israeli foods, and we have all of the latest Israeli movies on DVD, which keeps it close to us in tactile and visual ways. Still, these past two weeks have been full of the news of Jerusalem and the frictions with the United States, and I cannot help but wonder how that slow dripping of news of contention erodes both commitment to Israel and Jewish identity both for my children and their peers. Put aside the merits of each argument— I just wish Israeli leaders who speak on these issues could speak with one coherent voice, and not sound like members of a government ruled by the likes of, say, the Philadelphia City Council. (I suppose that's as much the fault of Israeli voters as anyone, but at least they can vote.) That's asking a lot, but then, a lot is at stake. But back to how I cope with that: in addition to the foods and movies, I push books at them with some or less success.

I just got my son, who next year will attend a university and major in math and computer science, to start reading 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. I enjoyed the book immensely, and took away from it, among other things, you cannot prove the existence of God, but that living a life of Torah, a feeling some sort of spirit move you whether or not you believe a divine presence forces it, can be worthwhile and fulfilling. What he might get I do not know, but I would be curious to see your take on the book. (My daughter is a big Bernard Malamud and Etgar Keret fan.)

Well, I again want to thank you for the wisdom you and your magazine have brought into my home.

Richard Handler

March 23, 2010

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

What a generous and Jewish reading of this stunning movie, Yoram! I must confess, I found it darker, much darker than you. Still brilliant and funny, but at times I felt like I was one of those audience members in the classic movie The Producers, watching in horror as Hitler and his general staff danced and sang a tune in a Broadway Holocaust musical comedy (aptly named, Springtime for Hitler).

But that's an aside, and I only mention it because that scene occurred to me while watching the A Serious Man (I also hoped no gentile would be watching it, it showed such 'trade secrets' to our people, its audience). It is true that Larry, unlike Job, is a schlep, a passive head in the sands Jew. And he's full of ambivalence (and possibly, in existential terms, bad faith too). But there is one detail you missed which goes to the point, in my dark interpretation. It's at the end of that marvelous scene you describe, when Danny, Larry's son, goes to see Rabbi Marshak, hidden behind his walls, scholarship and stolid, kitschy furniture. You neglect to mention that when approached, Marshak utters a line from the rock group Jefferson Airplane. He's been listening to the tape, taken from Danny earlier in the movie, which he hands back to Danny as he tells him to "be a good boy."

The line, which also could be heard in the beginning of the movie during Bar Mitzvah lessons as Danny listened to his Walkman, was this: "When the truth has found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies...."

I believe the Coen's left out the end of the sentence and the question ("don't you want somebody to love?")

It's a broken communication, a possibly nihilistic culmination of 3000 years of Jewish history. When the Truth is Known to be Lies and all the Joy With You Dies...."

This the moment, before the ending scene of simmering apocalypse (which like you I will not spoil, if you post this).

You can read this two ways: All of Jewish wisdom comes to this? A rock n roll song? Oh my God, all those sacred texts and Gracie Slick gives us the Jewish message?

Or, if you wish, all of Jewish wisdom culminates in the verse of a profound rock n roll song, it just so happens.

There are other interpretations, no doubt. But while watching it, I felt the sand around Larry's head move into my parched mouth.

Pick n chose. When gentiles summarize our wisdom in pop songs, how much remains of the faith for us lost, secular, Diaspora Jews?

I look forward to your letters.

Marat Grinberg

March 22, 2010

Reed college

“The Cohens’ not Quite Jewish Moment: a Response to Yoram Hazony”
Yoram Hazony provides a wonderful and exhaustive analysis of A Serious Man. The only problem, in my humble, but critical opinion, is that it happens to be a complete misreading of the film. Hazony is right – the Cohen brothers’ latest undertaking is an event, primarily because it widens the scope of the famed filmmakers’ body of work, but also because, for the first time, they completely and openly took on the Jewish thematics. The result, however, is not “one of the best Jewish films ever made, anywhere,” but a film that can hardly quality as Jewish at all, if one understands Jewishness as Hazony rightfully does: a culture based on interpreting texts that yield meanings, moral, existential, historical, etc.
Most importantly, A Serious Man is not a satire; nor is it a cartoon. The Cohens use satirical snapshots of American Jews, largely outdated and almost cliché by this point (think of Philip Roth’s first collection of stories, Goodbye Columbus, as one of the sources, for instance) as fodder for their grotesque concoction. For Roth, indeed, there were real prototypes behind his characters; there were also larger, not merely satirical, implications to his stories. Unlike Roth, the Cohens do not merely exaggerate. They radicalize to create a place that exists not in suburban America of the 60’s, but only within the parameters of their grotesquery. The grotesque is meant to both make us laugh and horrify. This is precisely what the film’s creatures do. They are not portrayals of Jews, Americans, or even human beings. They are one-dimensional marionettes that chew (literally) and spew nonsense. They are goblins (think of the first rabbi) and monsters (think of the protagonist’s brother). What is truly unsettling is that their nonsense is racist (constant hatred of the goyim). Thus, Jewishness in the film is an all-pervading thread, vile and incurable. The only comfort the viewer can derive from this is that for the Cohens, the referent is lost. Their imagination produces this version of Jewishness, not the investigations of history and texts.
Hazony is right – there is one character that falls out of the film’s overall landscape, namely a serious man himself, the protagonist. His fault, however, is not that he, like a character from Kafka, thinks that he is innocent, whereas in fact he is morally faulty, but that he is the only one who attempts to break out of the boundaries of the grotesque, for which he is severely punished. To presume, as does Hazony, that we are dealing with a Jeremiad character here, or that the third rabbi stands for a remote, but benevolent God, is to force an interpretation on the Cohens that is inimical to their aesthetics. The thought that the chief-rabbi is a stand-in for God is truly horrifying. But this is not what the Cohens are saying; nor are they rehashing a familiar notion of the Old Testament deity as cruel and judgmental. These questions are outside of the scope of their vision, since it is neither exegetical, nor moral, nor psychological. The only punishers in this universe are its creators themselves, who throw a poor “serious man” into the grotesque nightmare only to pluck him out and destroy once he begins to perceive some semblance of an exit out of it.
The question that remains is what makes this film so special and unnerving then? The grotesque has often been the domain of the artists and productively so (think of Gogol and Nabokov in literature, for instance, or Bunuel in cinema). The Cohens, of course, tried their hand at it before. Yet in Fargo, one of the greatest films ever made indeed, where there were creatures as well, chewing their food and spewing nonsense, there was also the character of Frances McDormand, whose inability to understand at the end how anyone could turn evil for “just a little bit of money” elevated the movie to a completely new moral plain, without abandoning its aesthetic language, but only by enhancing it. In A Serious Man, however, we only crawl deeper into the grotesque hole. The effect of going through it is one of emptiness.
The problem is no matter how hard we try to dissociate the film’s monstrosity of Jewishness from anything meaningful (seeing it as a social critique would be an absurd exercise), we cannot help but be disturbed by it. Self-hatred has probably nothing to do with the Cohens’ vision. There is no doubt that they feel secure in their identity. They must know that what they are creating is much more than a satire, or a caricature; there is a meticulous artistic hand behind each of their frames. There must be reasons, which have to do with their childhood, their parents (the brothers claim that the “serious man” is based on their father), but to ponder those is to go into uncharted territories. There does remain another possibility, however. Within A Serious Man, there are in fact two films: a parable in the beginning, and life in American suburbia throughout the movie. The former is radically different from the rest of the picture: it is radiant, its language is Yiddish, rich and vibrant, its characters are vivacious; its tradition is that of Yiddish storytelling, later taken up by the Yiddish modernists. The links between the parable and the rest of the film’s events are non-existent. To establish what they are is to play into the Cohens’ absurdist tricks. Thus, are the Cohens suggesting that the only venue left for artists of Jewish heritage who have no organic links with the realm of Yiddishkeit is via the grotesque? The rich Jewish traditions, of which they are clearly aware, cannot be accessed by them. There is a meaning somewhere out there, but their lot is to spin parables of another sort, such as the second rabbi’s nonsensical tale of a goy’s tooth.
Yet, of course, theirs is not the only path. It is in fact Woody Allen, who always, either explicitly, or implicitly, locates meaning through constructing Jewishness, textually, morally, and sentimentally in the best sense of the term. There are others: Paul Mazursky with his Next Stop: Greenwich Village, and even Spielberg, whose Munich, despite its flourishes and lapses into bad taste, provided a profound moral interrogation of Jewishness. I am sure the Cohens know their model is a very different one. We should as well.

Noam Zion

March 22, 2010

Hartman Inst.

Thank for the analysis of the movie. Here is what I wrote about it before I read yours.
PS I loved your book, Dawn.

THE SERIOUS MAN BY THE BROTHERS COEN

Personal Background
1.Coen brothers grew up in St Louis Park = St "Jewish" Park – 30% Jewish – first suburb after North Mpls Ghetto
2.Filmed in Bnai Abraham Synagogue, which was my father's shul, Rabbi Moses B Sachs
3.Sanctuary was redone and used for movie for the BM and for my father's yahrzeit
4.Tornadoes typical of spring, in fact, 5 tornadoes hit Minneapolis in 1967 when movie is set, taking many lives
5.Mpls TT of Haskala ivrit b ivrit culture, hence study of grammar and even the interrogation in principal's office is conducted in Hebrew
6.Movie's Principal is called "Turchik" who was in real life a feared disciplinarian VP who while very short spoke with a loud voice and was always flanked by seven feet tall janitor Slim who terrified little intellectual Jews
7.The Bar Mitzvah parsha is Behukotai which is about curses and blessings. It was Ethan Coen's BM parsha according to one of his classmates who was invited to the BM, though it was not originally in Bnai Abraham

Biblical References
1.David's moral downfall begins on roof who spies Batsheva bathing naked which is David's fall. So Mrs Samsky (the sexy shiksa is herself a Jewess) offers the serious man "liberation" from rules, now that his marriage is over. Her sexual offer transmutes to marijuana which is also what Job's son smokes. His son stole money from his sister who stole it from her father to buy pot and that got in trouble with big boy the drug dealer to whom he owed the money. Later the father will "steal" bribe from Korean when he finally seeks to bend the rules and give him a C -. That brings on God's punishment – cancer – from doctor.
2.Job who never does anything wrong, who is rule driven suffers inexplicable and unjustified suffering: the skin disease that is embodied in brother Arthur's boils; Korean accusation about bribe; letters to tenure committee about his immorality – that comes from wife's boyfriend; financial losses; demand to pay for subscription to records – which his son ordered;
3.Job is righteous who did nothing wrong just as serious man says "but I didn't do anything." He rebukes his son for not preparing for BM (Parshat Behar)
4.Job's "three friends" are three rabbis. But the rabbis do not try to blame Job but simply tell him it is a mystery. Gopnick treasts rabbis not as comforters but as deciphers of Urim vTumim or oracle. First rabbi brings Heschel's answer -the wonder of life even in parking lot. Second rabbi on mysterious message sent through teeth of goy to dentist – Hoshieini! Save me!. Third rabbi will not meet our serious man but he gives wisdom to his son after the BM from Jefferson Airplane lead singer Gracie that when you are down and depressed then….. He returns the illicit radio which disturbed study of Torah in TT and reveals that wisdom comes not from old books or old men but from music of 1967
5.Whirlwind is God's appearance in tornado to threaten to wipe out Mpls TT and all the good kids learning there. This accompanies call from doctor about cancer when serious man finally agrees to accept bribe to pay for Uncle Arthur's lawyer to defend him against his crime of mathematical system to beat gamblers which Arthur claims is not forbidden and that he did nothing. Thus God proves his justice as soon as our serious man finally makes one mistake. That seems unfair or too strict. God also punished the wife and the adulterer who sent anonymous complaints to the tenure committee with a car accident, though serious man had to pay for funeral.
6.Arthur complains like Job about unjust discrimination because serious man's life is so good and Arthur's so cursed. Yet Arthur repents. In fact what makes the serious man "good" is not that did nothing to break laws, but that willing to show hesed to sick, disorganized, worthless brother

Dybbuk – what does that have to do with anything?
1.Dybbuk was first Jewish movie in 1930s so maybe Coen brothers pay it homage as they do their Jewish movie
2.Represent old world with Yiddish music and wisdom of old rabbi
3.Mysterious and inexplicable just as whole movie is.
4.Old man appears like Elijah to help the husband whose wagon got stuck and husband welcome shim into his home. But wife sees him as Satan (recalls beginning of Job with Satan testing Job?) so she tries to prempt whole story of curses
5.Maybe unjust murder of old man is beginning of curse and this old world couple are ancestors of serious man

Physics and Religion
"Job” is a physics teacher who teaches his students the long complex formula of Schrodinger, however it would have been even better if he had taught Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. So physics itself has given up on certainty, yet when bad things happen to our Job that cannot be explained, then he cannot live with the uncertainty and seeks to explicate the mystery by consulting with the equally baffled rabbis.

James Diamond

March 22, 2010

University of Waterloo

I read your review with great interest however while I agree with you that it is profound and one of the best Jewish films made in a long time I arrived at an understanding of the film startlingly opposed to yours (perhaps that itself is a sign of its profundity). Here's my reading:

The epigraph quoted from Rashi - "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you," is probably key to the Yiddish segment and thereby to the film as a whole which I see as a devastating critique of religion.It is his comment to Deut. 18:13 (You must conduct yourself with simplicity with the Lord your God) and the full text is:רש"י דברים פרק יח פסוק יגתמים תהיה עם ה' אלהיך - התהלך עמו בתמימות ותצפה לו ולא תחקור אחר העתידות, אלא כל מה שיבא עליך קבל בתמימות ואז תהיה עמו ולחלקו:"Conduct yourself with simplicity with Him and look toward Him [for answers] and do not try to determine the future; but rather receive with simplicity everything that happens to you and then you will be with Him."What is interesting about this is that it is a response to the context of the previous verses outlawing all the magic associated with pagan religions such as necromancy, soothsayers, diviners, and sorcerers.קסם קסמים מעונן ומנחש ומכשף וחבר חבר ושאל אוב וידעני ודרש אל המתיםIn other words Rashis' comment promotes an attitude that is the corrective to that which grounds all these superstitions- don't try and second guess God and therefore attempt to change the future course of your life by various means thought to control God. Rather accept what has been allotted to you by God and move on.Considering this and the portrayal of religion and its inadequacy to respond to Gopnik's troubles throughout the rest of the movie I think the film equates all the prohibited magic with Judaism and religion altogether which operate on the same assumptions- i.e. that we can somehow look to God for answers that will somehow alleviate our desperate lives and perhaps have Him change their course. It is a critique of religion altogether (same as belief in magic, necromancy, shedim, etc.) Any faith in anything beyond one's own very limited ability to control one's destiny retards that very ability and prevents one from advancing or overcoming within that limited realm of human capability.In the Yiddish scene the wife represents religion and superstition attributing misfortune to unseen powers. It is made clear that the guest is not a demon by the fact that he begins to bleed profusely. It is only for a moment prior to the wound opening that the couple, and we in the audience, are misled into believing the wife is correct. The wife resorts to religion (i.e. Superstition) to solve a problem but what she has done is in fact destroy life. Her recourse to "religion" in response to a perceived threat actually ends up in taking another's life and therefore simply more suffering and senseless pain. The message is there is no rhyme or reason to suffering or injustice from any transcendent view. There is simply an acceptance that allows us to overcome or resist as best we can within the scope of our own human capacities. To look for answers elsewhere is to invite further disaster.As for the three Rabbis here are some of my reflections that I think thrust the knife even deeper into the heart of religion.1)The first Rabbi (who doesn't even know what a "get" is) analogizes life to a parking lot. The parking lot is often a metaphor for desolation (tearing down buildings and putting up parking lots); nothingness.2)The second Rabbi (more learned?) tells over the story of the dentist. The cry for salvation (hoishieini) is inscribed in a place where the subject is not even aware of it; It is discovered by the profession with which high rates of suicide has always been associated. Absolutely nothing comes of it. The "hoishieini" therefore, the cry to an unseen Power (or what is at the very heart of prayer), is better left undiscovered because all it leads to is anxiety and dread. Once the dentist forgets about prayer he actually can resume and get on with his life. 3)Finally the most learned Rabbi - utters the words of the Jefferson Airplane song "when the truth is found to be lies"- I believe this is the "truth" of religion he has lived with all his life; that there is a plane of reality beyond the empirical. Just before he talks, as the bar mitzvah boy approaches him, we see specimens in jars; i.e. he has become a scientist; an empiricist. Then we see a drawing of the akedah ; i.e. considering the scene and the older generation about to transmit the "truth" (religion) to a child- the truth is a lie. The message is should that truth be perpetuated we destroy our children; i.e. the akedah= murdering your child in the name of religion. (there is no one who calls out to us). That is why the Rabbi returns the radio. It is an acknowledgment that the "truth" lies in that rather than in what religious school has taught which is "found to be lies." The coup de grace is the final scene which is clearly an allusion to Job but utterly subversive of it. In Job the whirlwind brings some kind of resolution. We can argue about what it means but at the very least God responds, there is an encounter with the transcendent and ultimately there is of course restoration of everything Job has lost and suffered. The "whirlwind" however at the end of the film portends absolute devastation and destruction. By having the "serious man" receive the call from his doctor with what is clearly bad news about his medical tests at the same time we see the tornado approach the cheder implies the same fate for all the children in the cheder. The final scene forebodes the deaths of both the serious man and all the children and the destruction of the very institution that perpetuates religious tradition.

Sharon Rappaport

March 21, 2010

UC Santa Cruz

What exactly is funny about a Jew portrayed as a pervert screaming a reference to HaShem in a derogatory way? This movie has been seen by thousands of people. That you think such negative stereotyping is cleaver, enlightening, educational, or meaningful in anyway, except as typical anti-Semitic trashing by Jews of the Jewish people, is a poor reflection on the supposedly advanced Shalem Center. What a disappointment. G-d help us.

Azriel C. Fellner

March 21, 2010

ACFMedia

This is by far the best examination and analysis of the Coen brothers film "A Serious Man," that I have read.

Last year, at the invitation of executives at Warner Brothers I gave a lecture about the 1927 version of "The Jazz Singer. " I pointed out that within the "moguls" Jewish hearts, divided, often self- hating, quick to withdraw from the image of their nee'r-do-well shtetle fathers and desperate to become totally Americanized, there still was a desire to explore what it means to be Jewish in a society, which, while not always welcoming, was still open. The history of Jews in the movies and making movies is complex and a riveting narrative in and of itself.

What I would like to add to your wonderful analysis, however, is that while the movies were reluctant to deal with Jewish issues on a serious level, American television in the 90's was astonishingly open to Jewish themes. Long running programs such as "Picket Fences," "Northern Exposure," "LA Law," and others opened up the Jewish community to America in ways that had not been done before. The same "Hasid" who appears in "A Serious Man," for example, the actor Fyvush Finkel, is a major cast member portraying a Jewish lawyer in a city called Rome in mid-America in the series "Picket Fences.". His run- ins with the Jewish community, a celebrated "Beth Din" dealing with anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred are classic segments. As another example, there is a "Northern Exposure" episode (this is a series which takes place in Alaska, and a Jewish doctor must spend several years there to pay off the cost of his medical training) in which the entire Jonah story is told as a Midrash within a Midrash.

I happen to have segments of all these programs, and more, and have been lecturing extensively throughout the United States and Canada, too, dealing with Jewish issues, problems, and characters as they appear in television programs and on the screen. My point is that the beginning of the examination of Jewish life in America may have began on television. Only slowly is this phenomenon migrating to the movies, and "A Serious Man," as you point out is the best example, so far, of that migration.

I read all your columns with great interest and look forward to each.

Ivor Freeman

March 21, 2010

N/A

I am glad you enjoyed the film. I found it very boring, a very distasteful expose of improbable Jewish characters. It was billed as a comedy but after most of the film I had not even had a smile let alone a laugh so I stopped watching it. It may have hidden depth as an exaggerated story of life activities. I agree that the tough part of life is seeing when we are given an opportunity to learn. This film portrayed the situation in such an extreme form that it does not impact the viewer as you have explained it. If,therefore, it only appears a good film to those with the perspicacity to see it, then it has failed to impact the rest of the population. There is little benefit in preaching to the wise!

Marvin Spiegelman

March 21, 2010

Private Psychoanalytic Practice

We seem to have seen different films! What I saw was a disgusting caricature from beginning to end based on a flawed version of Job. There was nothing to really connect any meaning with these events and most unattractive and stereotyped people. The producers turn out to be another batch of modern, deracinated, possibly self-hating Jews who detest what they came from and offer nothing in return. I suggest you read C.G. Jung's "Answer to Job" for a more meaningful reflection on that powerful document.